


The Incident

by Keith Danger Kogane (Bulletproof_BoyScouts)



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Hogwarts, Fluff, M/M, Pidge and Hunk are the prankster dream team, Potions Accident
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-05-02
Updated: 2017-05-02
Packaged: 2018-10-26 18:27:51
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,358
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10792260
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Bulletproof_BoyScouts/pseuds/Keith%20Danger%20Kogane
Summary: There was nothing like the sweet smell of a potion gone wrong.According to Pidge, anyway.





	The Incident

**Author's Note:**

> This was only supposed to be a short, sweet fic... 
> 
> Not beta-read or proof-read because it's been stewing for far too long already and I just really would like to get it out there.
> 
> I sincerely hope you enjoy it nonetheless!

It would hardly be fair to Keith if Shiro pointed out that his hair was doing _the thing_ , so he kept silent, straight-faced every time Keith looked up at him in confusion. He might give back a small smile, enough to pacify Keith, but as soon as the Gryffindor looked down at his food again, Shiro’s eyes would be drawn right back to the little tufts of hair.

There had been… An incident.

It had only happened a few weeks ago, but Keith had been coerced into testing a potion brewed up by none other than Hogwarts’ resident Slytherin genius, Pidge Gunderson.

What had happened, had apparently gone something along the lines of Pidge somehow convincing Keith that this potion that they had cooked up with Hunk, another of the school’s geniuses, would be (in Pidge’s words) “absolutely fine” followed by something mumbled, which should have indicated to the bemused Keith that it wouldn’t be fine at all. Keith had ended up gulping down a vial of a silvery potion that he described as tasting something like “you know the smell of roses? It tastes like that. Also grass”. What Pidge and Hunk had cleverly left out was that they had altered a recipe in a book from the vast library to the point where it wasn’t really the same potion at all anymore. They desperately needed a test subject for what they were convinced was a _totally harmless_ potion and Keith just so happened to be the one wandering past the classroom they had commandeered.

In the end, Keith had been sitting grumpily on a bed, the matron poking at two soft, feline ears protruding from his head. A silky tail flicked angrily every time someone so much as looked his way, and delicate claws now adorned his hands.

The worst part was probably that they were purple.

Keith managed to convince himself that had this all been a normal fur colour then it would have maybe been bearable. If his eyes hadn’t glowed golden, suddenly appearing as if he had no iris at all for the shades of yellow in his eye were so similar, then maybe he could have tucked the tail away and flattened the ears under a cap. It really didn’t help that his skin was now tinted a sort of dark lavender colour, making the one other patient simply turn over and go back to sleep the one time she woke up and glanced over. (At that, Keith had forcefully closed the curtain, nails nearly ripping the thin fabric.)

As it stood, Keith now looked like a big, purple cat and the second Shiro saw him, curled up grumpily on the bed, he couldn’t help the soft coo.

“You think this is funny?” Keith all but hissed, tail flicking again.

Shiro quickly schooled his face into a more appropriate expression than something one might use when faced with several tiny puppies. He coughed awkwardly before saying, “Of course not. I heard that Pidge and Hunk did this to you. Want me to go and sort them out?” He was only teasing, but even when the Gryffindor’s eyes were practically liquid gold, Shiro could still see the fire that was sparked by the idea of the buff Hufflepuff roughing up the younger students.

Keith stayed silent, probably forming a terrible plan in his head that had maybe a thirty percent chance at success. It was something that Keith always promised he’d work on – not acting rashly and beating up your best friends because they turned you purple, for example.

He was quickly torn from his scheming by the feeling of a hand on his head and he jumped a bit, shying away from the gentle touch until it started to pet him softly. It wasn’t too bad, he supposed. It was rather soothing in fact, having someone lightly scratching behind your ears and smoothing down fluffy hair. This must be what cats felt like, he decided. He found himself enjoying it after a few minutes, awkwardly manoeuvring without rising too high off the bed to reposition himself across Shiro’s lap. His tail was tracing slow arcs in the air behind him and he was beginning to think this might not be so bad if he could just spend all his time like this.

Of course, this is when Lance burst into the infirmary.

The first words out of his mouth had been something along the lines of, “What the hell did they manage to do to you this time?” and Shiro’s soft whimper as Keith dug his claws into the Hufflepuff’s leg along with the irritated twitching of Keith’s ears and tail were the only indicators that the Gryffindor was aware of his presence. His expression was still completely flat, although it was somewhat harder to read his face what with the slight structural changes that made it markedly more feline than it had been before.

“Wow!” Lance laughed, yanking back the curtain and dropping himself to sit on the bed opposite. “They really did a number on you, didn’t they? Can’t say I’m surprised honestly, I’m only disappointed that they never managed to catch you sooner.” He was ignoring Shiro entirely, way more focused on teasing and insulting his self-proclaimed rival than on Shiro, who was still trying to calm Keith enough to get him to retract his claws. “So, when do I get to start the ‘remember when Keith was a purple cat’ monologues?”

“Hopefully soon if matron can work out what exactly happened,” Shiro explained, breathing a sigh of relief when Keith’s claws finally let him go. “This isn’t something she’s seen before, so they’re debating just letting it wear off on its own.”

“Oh man, I hope this never wears off,” Lance said with a laugh, reaching out and patting Keith’s head roughly, a jarring contrast to the gentle petting Shiro had been doing. It startled Keith enough when the other Gryffindor’s hand smacked into his head that he dug his claws back into Shiro’s leg, a sharp gasp coming from the man above him.

“Yes, thank you, Lance,” Shiro said, trying to hide the pained whimper in his voice to the best of his abilities. “I think it might be time that you leave now.”

After Lance left, Shiro had worked his fingers in tiny circles around Keith’s new ears, trying to calm him down. He was vaguely expecting the rumbling purr, but it still made him jump slightly, especially as Keith stretched and settled more comfortably.

A few minutes passed and Shiro really needed to go to his history of magic lesson, but Keith had fallen asleep on him, his surprisingly heavy weight keeping him seated. Shiro’s back ached, but he sat there for roughly an hour until Keith woke up with a yawn and another stretch.

From that point on, Keith seemed to be ever so slowly losing the effects of the potion despite his oddly catlike behaviours such as napping most of the time and patrolling a route around the school day after day. Pidge and Hunk had been severely scolded by Allura, the headmistress, given after school detentions for a whole month, threats of expulsion, and banned from practicing potions outside of lessons. For the twenty third time that year. (Pidge simply convinced Hunk to move their operations to yet another disused classroom.)

Keith’s skin had been the first thing to change back, gradually lightening until there was only a faint undertone of violet on his otherwise pale skin. It had been a grand old shame for Lance, who relished in calling Keith ‘purple Bagpuss’ every time he saw him. This meant that Keith had a far easier time avoiding the eyes that now followed him for reasons other than his near legendary quidditch skills as he tucked the ears under a hood and the tail was firmly wrapped around his leg whenever he could make it. There were some times when his ears would twitch or swivel such that even the hood couldn’t hide the motion.

These moments mostly came when a familiar set of footsteps would approach. He might have claimed that this extreme hypersensitivity that the potion gave him was a bad thing. Well, it was, in most cases. He found that his late nights spent in Shiro’s dorm were far more enjoyable when he could feel _everything_ , but that did not mean that he enjoyed hearing Lance from even further away than usual. Granted, this gave him time to dart down a different corridor, or slip into a classroom to avoid him, but it grated on his already frazzled nerves.

It was irritating to Keith, this whole thing. It was more irritating that Shiro was absolutely enamoured by how silky the fur on his tail and ears were, meaning that the Hufflepuff spent most of his time absentmindedly petting Keith instead of paying attention. It was a good thing Shiro was a year above in all honesty; he didn’t know how Shiro would ever focus in class if he couldn’t keep his eyes off the Gryffindor more than usual. It was good for Keith’s self-esteem, he supposed.

“Good morning,” Shiro called as Keith sulked his way over to perch next to him at the Hufflepuff table in the great hall. It had been customary since Shiro’s third year and Keith’s second for them to sit together at one table or another, although it started leaning heavily towards the Hufflepuff table once Lance finally joined the quidditch team. “Sleep well?”

“You already know all of this; why do you still insist on asking?” Keith teased, the quirk of his lip giving away his intentions.

“Because, I’m a nice guy,” Shiro explained, piling food onto Keith’s plate that he would never finish. Shiro liked to think it helped still.

Keith only grumbled, snatching the buttered toast right from Shiro’s hand as the Hufflepuff raised it to take a bite. At Shiro’s disappointed whine Keith took two bites before shoving the half-eaten toast back into Shiro’s mouth.

“That’s gross!”

“But you’re still eating it,” Keith pointed out, a sly grin creeping across his face. Shiro was indeed chewing the toast glumly.

After a few minutes of quiet banter with Hunk, who had finally turned up (he had been scribbling something in a notepad, glancing over at Keith occasionally), and eating, Shiro asked, “Any idea how much longer you’ll be like that?”

Keith bristled, the fur on his ears and tail raising and making him look fluffier than his unruly hair usually did. It was still a sensitive topic, despite the ears, tail and eyes being the only outward signs of the potions effect left, he still didn’t want to talk about it. It was bad enough that people stared and whispered behind their hands, giving him pitying looks, he didn’t want it from Shiro too.

“No,” he replied anyway. “Pidge and Hunk said that it should just wear off, but they’re getting less and less convinced the longer this goes on.”

Hunk only gave a sheepish grin and some muttered apologies, whisking away to badger Pidge, probably about their latest plot.

As it stood, they were currently a month from the initial incident and despite Keith’s best efforts of taping down the ears and covering them with his hair, they still wiggled and raised the hair above them in a way that infuriated Keith whenever anyone pointed them out. Pidge had learned quickly after the first time they pointed them out not to mention it, Hunk not even bringing it up once. Lance of course pointed it out constantly, even when it wasn’t happening. Shiro just gave them fond looks when Keith wasn’t aware.

Overall, Keith was having mixed feelings about this.

At one point, Hunk tried to convince him to drink milk out of a bowl like a cat. “Because it’s cute!” he insisted. Keith just thought it was _weird_. That didn’t happen, but when Pidge slipped a ball of yarn in his bag, he found himself tangling his fingers in it more often than he would admit. Lance got Keith a collar, winking at him as he sauntered off and leaving him incredibly flustered with a pink Shiro standing at his shoulder. (When Lance asked what he did with the collar a while later, Keith was silent.)

Keith was more or less sick of being a purple cat by this point. Granted, his skin was almost completely a ghostly I-never-go-outside white again and the claws could hardly be considered claws anymore. The tail seemed to be shrinking too and slowly he was turning back to normal. His explosive anger at Pidge and Hunk waned day by day.

“It’s weird,” Keith admitted to Shiro during one of their late night ‘study’ sessions. They were hanging out in the Hufflepuff common room, curled up on one of the plush sofas together.

“Hmm?” was all he got from a particularly drowsy Shiro.

“I was kind of starting to enjoy it…”

“Really?” Shiro asked, stifling a yawn behind his fist. “I could have sworn you hated every second of it.”

“Well, at first I did. It was just so… different.” Keith moved to rest his head against Shiro’s chest, listening to his steady heartbeat through crumpled robes. “After a while, though, it started to grow on me. I told you about the senses and stuff, right? It was overwhelming, but useful. I don’t know… Just forget I mentioned anything.”

By the time Keith had stopped talking, Shiro had already dozed off, light breaths tickling the still fluffy ears on the Gryffindor’s head. He felt almost automatically indignant that someone would just _fall asleep_ in the middle of him revealing his genuine feelings, but he was quick to forgive, especially when it came to the older boy. They had been… _studying_ hard all day after all; it was late.

“Come on, let’s get you to a proper bed,” Keith whispered, tugging Shiro’s heavy, half-awake form all the way up to his dorm room, where Keith slipped off Shiro’s crumpled school clothes and tucked the Hufflepuff in.

He kissed Shiro’s forehead, leaving only a whispered, “goodnight,” behind.

**Author's Note:**

> So, if this seems at all unfinished or rushed, its probably because that part was. I mostly wrote this to get down an idea and it became a weird half-formed monster that could have a lot of potential if I ever come back to it! I do love Hogwarts AUs though so the potential for another is... higher than most AUs.
> 
> Thank you dearly for reading!


End file.
